In Nigeria’s accountability ecosystem, blame is not avoided, it is professionally redistributed. These six job titles offer the perfect mix of authority, plausible deniability, and enough committee meetings to survive any scandal untouched.
1. "Special Adviser." His entire job is to advise. He is never, under any circumstances, the one who acted on that advice, which means every failed decision can be traced back to "the person who was advised," a category with no name and no accountability attached.
2. "Consultant to the Committee." He was consulted. The committee, separately and independently, made the final decision. In the resulting scandal, nobody can quite establish who decided what, which is, of course, the entire architectural point of the title.
3. "Chairman, Implementation Task Force." He chairs meetings about implementation, a distinctly different activity from actually implementing anything, a distinction Nigerian bureaucracy has elevated into an entire employment category.
4. "Technical Assistant to the Technical Adviser." Two full layers of "technical" now separate any actual decision from any actual consequence, a structural buffer so effective it should be studied by risk management departments worldwide.
5. "Coordinator, Interim Transition Committee." The transition in question has been "interim" since 2016, which raises the philosophical question of whether something can still be called transitional after nearly a decade of not transitioning anywhere.
6. "Ag. Director (Acting)." He has been "acting" in this role for six consecutive years, a performance of temporary authority so committed and sustained it deserves an award nobody in government will ever think to give him.
Somewhere in Abuja, there is an org chart with forty boxes and zero arrows pointing toward accountability.
Keep reading
After years of fuel prices doing acrobatics, Lagos traffic defeating GPS, and passengers demanding Lekki-to-Ikeja comfort at “my guy abeg” rates, Uber may have finally discovered Nigeria is less a market than a practical exam in suffering.
Nyesom Dwala
In Nigeria’s content economy, even a boxing deal can collapse without anybody throwing a punch, as goodwill, Instagram Stories, and old grudges enter the ring to prove contracts are temporary but screenshots are forever.
Nyesom Dwala
Nigeria’s legal establishment has reportedly discovered a new qualification for conference speaking: sufficient comments-section warfare. Law students are now advised to replace case law with ring light, because relevance has entered the bar.
Nyesom Dwala
From “fake news” to forensic thread-reading in under 12 minutes, Nigerian Twitter has perfected its arrest-response protocol. Our columnist maps the timeline’s sacred journey from denial to memes to forgetting completely.
Nyesom Dwala
As Nigeria’s caption-based economy continues to outperform GDP, experts warn that any lifestyle requiring three jets, five borrowed watches and one unnamed “import-export” business may deserve small second look.
Nyesom Dwala
As Peller and Jarvis prepare to say “I do,” Nigerians are preparing to say everything else. From livestream economists to comment-section detectives, tomorrow’s wedding is expected to briefly replace fuel prices as the nation’s biggest concern.
Nyesom Dwala
0 comments
